I wrote this by hand on paper while camping, way out in the woods.
Best to All,
Owl
----------------
When we last left our hero he was sitting on the
outermost outskirts of the ailing US Empire in one of the last undeveloped
regions of its eastern seaboard.
Surrounded by the vast miraculous beauty of a landscape at least vaguely
akin to what the long extinct sabertooths and giant sloths saw, he pondered an
injury of several months ago, which had altered his mobility, perhaps forever,
and struggled to be deep. It was easy to
get lost in petty reflections and frivolous musings, not to mention the urge to
masturbate--in fact, he knew he was a bit of ephemera on a planet that was
changing at a very alarming speed thanks to the advance and abundance of
humanity, currently teeming on a saturated globe, their selfishness stoked by
capitalism and technology, and the fears and material urges thus
magnified. Well, there was nothing he
could do about it, though there was always good cause to fret. Due to global warming, caused by coal plants
and cars (and the methane farting out of cattle asses) many big cities would be
heading underwater--but for half the people, the Republicans, it was too
painful to face so they made up reasons to hate the other half of the people,
the Democrats who kept annoying them with facts. Indeed, a psychological diametric had taken
hold in which half the people believed one list of things and the other half
believed another such list, and the two lists contradicted each other point by
point. Every night and every day it went
on and on, going nowhere while the sea kept rising up and the status of human
beings as dignified creatures went down and down (actually, our hero thought
this had bottomed up some time ago).
With the stupidity of humanity almost
incontrovertible (there was always a large reserve of genocides, wars,
inquisitions, oppressions, and run-of-the-mill rapes and violence to fall back
on, along with the associated miasmas of denial and fanaticism), there was
little hope for the benevolence of the Creator.
In vogue in realms cosmological of late was the theory of infinite
random universes, obviating the need for any sort of Creator, intelligent or
not. Any hope for a Good God/dess was
desperate relying on polytheism and balancing the atrocious state of affairs
with the admittedly amazing aspects of life.
How this good deity cohabitated with those monstrous was pretty much
beyond reckoning, requiring a leap of faith that would make a stylite
ecstatic. You had at least a
hypothetical archetypal standard of Good, measurable in various ethical ways,
say by contrasting freedom with slavery--and yet this hypothetical was a pretty
lonely place. Someday humans--or
whatever humans turned themselves into by combining with machines--might invent
an angel by filling a robot with the
right kind of advanced software, tantamount to the best of the brain; but it seemed more likely
they would invent the Devil first. In
fact, Dostoevsky had said that, if the Devil did not exist, people would have
to create him. And so far that had proved
resoundingly true.
So what to do, how to be, and what could really
matter? Dumb apes had evolved with
forelobes just large enough to create outliers:
the rare inventors and thinkers, who managed--sometimes--to tweak
reality--but the stupidity at the core of the collective human beast
remained. Ants were as adaptive as
humans and even had farms and advanced ventilation, disposal and social
systems. Individually an ant and a
typical human were pretty much the same--born into a framework of inculcated
habits--these were effective, true, but substantially rote.
Faced with a big dumb stubborn mass driven by a
few outliers, mainly rich people and the geniuses they tapped, there was little
our hero--or anyone--could do to shift the momentum of fate. Even the powerful rich people driving the
herd were prisoners of the collective ideology, which was yet another
manifestation of the old greed-and-peasantry thing. All you really could do was throw out sparks
of wisdom and hope, somehow, a fire got lit, and that it erupted into a
transformational conflagration. And so,
our hero wrote and wrote, but he had the feeling something was still
missing--and what that something was, he did not know, or was too scared to
face.
He wiped a swatted mosquito off the paper, dodging
its smear with his pen (not!) and reflected on whether Buddhist compassion
allowed the swatting of mosquitoes. The
Native Americans seemed to have it more right, but that was a pathetic
generalization over a thousand separate cultures; and appeals to shamanism as
understood through his eurocentric upbringing would be similarly flawed. Nevertheless, spirit guides seemed the way to
go. Jungian archetype sort of things,
but less lofty. Beings perhaps like earthy
guardian angels, intimate and personalized.
Such spirit guides could be purveyors of the Good, allies in seeking it
and so on. In fact, he didn’t know where
the poems he wrote came from, or even the screed he was currently penning--so
it all kinda made sense. Whether the
spirit guides were separate entities or parts of his own mind was irrelevant,
at least until he died, and then he’d know the difference--or not.
He invited his guides to watch over and guide him,
and help him seek the Good, what else to do?
There was compassion below it all, call it Buddhist or Christian or
whatever, and yet as soon as you labeled it, people grew possessive and
standoffish and fought those who labeled Compassion differently, and then none
of them ended up with any Compassion for any of the others, except in the “I
had to kill them to save them!” kind of way.
So, he kept it at the meta-religious level, the
generic, so everyone could agree and enjoy and be Compassionate to each other
and seek, through whatever God or guide they desired--
The Good.
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